1. What does Transcendentalism mean?
Ans :-
Overview :-
- The philosophy of transcendentalism arose in the 1830s in the eastern United States as a reaction to intellectualism. Its adherents yearned for intense spiritual experiences and sought to transcend the purely material world of reason and rationality.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were two of the most famous and influential transcendentalists.
- Some influential transcendentalists, such as Margaret Fuller, were early pioneers of feminism.
The philosophy of transcendentalism :-
The philosophy of transcendentalism originated in Unitarianism, the predominant religious movement in Boston in the early 19th century. Unitarianism was a liberal Christian sect that emphasized rationality, reason, and intellectualism; it was especially popular at Harvard.
The transcendentalists who established the Transcendental Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1836—mostly Unitarian clergy and Boston-area intellectuals—did not reject Unitarianism but yearned for a more spiritual experience to balance out the emphasis on pure reason. The very word transcendentalism refers to a spirituality that transcends the realm of rationality and the material world. Transcendentalists believed that humans were fundamentally good but corrupted by society and that they should therefore strive for independence and self-reliance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were two of the most famous transcendentalists. In 1845, Thoreau moved to a cabin that he built on Walden Pond in Massachusetts and lived there for two years, two months, and two days. He chronicled the experience in his book Walden, published in 1854, which explored the themes of nature, spirituality, self-reliance, and the simple life. Thoreau acknowledged the debt transcendentalism owed to Indian religious beliefs by paying homage to the Bhagavad Gita, a Sanskrit epic that is one of the foundational texts of Hinduism: “In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial.”
Emerson gained fame as an essayist and public lecturer; his 1836 essay “Nature” laid out many of the tenets of the transcendentalist philosophy. He suggested that God could be found in nature and that spending time in nature was the closest man could come to the divine. Another of Emerson’s most famous works was the 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” a defense of individualism, which emphasized nonconformity and personal responsibility. One of Emerson’s most famous quotes, a denunciation of mindless conformity, comes from this essay: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
Women and transcendentalism:-
Other influential transcendentalists were feminist pioneers. Margaret Fuller, a journalist and women’s rights advocate, edited The Dial, which was first published in 1840 and served as the primary journal of the transcendentalists until 1844. She was a frequent contributor to the journal and in 1845 published Woman in the Nineteenth Century, an early feminist manifesto that may have inspired the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention—the first conference in America devoted to the issue of women’s rights.
Other prominent female transcendentalists include Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who served as the business manager of The Dial and in 1860 established the first English-language kindergarten in the United States, and Louisa May Alcott, author of the classic novel Little Women.
Transcendentalism and reform :-
By the 1850s, many transcendentalists had become subsumed in the struggle to abolish slavery. As the incorporation of new territories into the Union exacerbated sectional tensions, the slavery issue dominated New England intellectual circles. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in keeping with his reverence for individual freedom, became a vocal abolitionist and spoke out against the Fugitive Slave Law—which provided for the return of runaway slaves—and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854—which held that settlers in Kansas and Nebraska would be the ones to decide whether those states would become slave states or free.
Because the leading transcendentalists began to focus their efforts on eliminating chattel slavery, transcendentalism faded from the scene by the 1850s. The ideas and writings of the transcendentalists, however, continued to inspire later reform movements, including the movement for women's suffrage, and the labor movement.
Ralph Waldo Emerson :-
A religious, philosophical and literary movement, Transcendentalism arose in New England in the middle of the nineteenth century. Critics generally cite 1836 to 1846 as the years when the movement flourished, although its influence continued to be felt in later decades, with some works considered part of the movement not being published until the 1850s. Transcendentalism began as a religious concept rooted in the ideas of American democracy. When a group of Boston ministers, one of whom was Ralph Waldo Emerson, decided that the Unitarian Church had become too conservative, they espoused a new religious philosophy, one which privileged the inherent wisdom in the human soul over church doctrine and law.
Among Transcendentalism’s followers were writers Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Walt Whitman; educator Bronson Alcott; and social theorists and reformers Theodore Parker and William Ellery Channing. Authors Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, and Edgar Allen Poe also felt the influence of Transcendentalism. Important works from the movement include Emerson’s Nature, “The American Scholar,” and “Self Reliance”; Thoreau’s Walden; Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century; and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Novels such as Melville’s Moby Dick and Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance also had transcendentalist leanings.
It is no coincidence that this movement took off just as the American literary tradition was beginning to blossom. Transcendentalism—though inspired by German and British Romanticism—was a distinctly American movement in that it was tied into notions of American individualism. In addition to the theme of American democracy, transcendentalist literature also promotes the idea of nature as divine and the human soul as inherently wise. Transcendentalism also had a political dimension, and writers such as Thoreau put their transcendentalist beliefs into action through acts of civil disobedience to the government. The nineteenth century was a volatile one, beginning with the hope and promise of democracy and the development of an American identity and moving towards mass devastation and division by the middle of the century. Slavery and the Civil War, women’s rights, growing industrialism and class division— all of these events were influential and each had a role to play in the transcendentalist movement.
Transcendentalism is an American literary, philosophical, religious, and political movement of the early nineteenth century, centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson. Other important transcendentalists were Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Lydia Maria Child, Amos Bronson Alcott, Frederic Henry Hedge, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and Theodore Parker. Stimulated by English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Herder and Schleiermacher, and the skepticism of Hume, the transcendentalists operated with the sense that a new era was at hand. They were critics of their contemporary society for its unthinking conformity, and urged that each person find, in Emerson’s words, “an original relation to the universe”. Emerson and Thoreau sought this relation in solitude amidst nature, and in their writing. By the 1840s they, along with other transcendentalists, were engaged in the social experiments of Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden; and, by the 1850s in an increasingly urgent critique of American slavery.
What we now know as transcendentalism first arose among the liberal New England Congregationalists, who departed from orthodox Calvinism in two respects: they believed in the importance and efficacy of human striving, as opposed to the bleaker Puritan picture of complete and inescapable human depravity; and they emphasized the unity rather than the “Trinity” of God (hence the term “Unitarian,” originally a term of abuse that they came to adopt.) Most of the Unitarians held that Jesus was in some way inferior to God the Father but still greater than human beings; a few followed the English Unitarian Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) in holding that Jesus was thoroughly human, although endowed with special authority. The Unitarians’ leading preacher, William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), portrayed orthodox Congregationalism as a religion of fear, and maintained that Jesus saved human beings from sin, not just from punishment. His sermon “Unitarian Christianity” (1819) denounced “the conspiracy of ages against the liberty of Christians”and helped give the Unitarian movement its name. In “Likeness to God” (1828) he proposed that human beings “partake” of Divinity and that they may achieve “a growing likeness to the Supreme Being” .
An important source for the transcendentalists’ knowledge of German philosophy was Frederic Henry Hedge (1805–90). Hedge’s father Levi Hedge, a Harvard professor of logic, sent him to preparatory school in Germany at the age of thirteen, after which he attended the Harvard Divinity School. Ordained as a Unitarian minister, Hedge wrote a long review of the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge for the Christian Examiner in 1833. Noting Coleridge’s fondness for “German metaphysics” and his immense gifts of erudition and expression, he laments that Coleridge had not made Kant and the post-Kantians more accessible to an English-speaking audience. This is the task—to introduce the “transcendental philosophy” of Kant, that Hedge takes up. In particular, he explains Kant’s idea of a Copernican Revolution in philosophy: “since the supposition that our intuitions depend on the nature of the world without, will not answer, assume that the world without depends on the nature of our intuitions.” This “key to the whole critical philosophy,” Hedge continues, explains the possibility of “a priori knowledge”. Hedge organized what eventually became known as the Transcendental Club, by suggesting to Emerson in 1836 that they form a discussion group for disaffected young Unitarian clergy. The group included George Ripley and Bronson Alcott, had some 30 meetings in four years, and was a sponsor of The Dial and Brook Farm. Hedge was a vocal opponent of slavery in the 1830s and a champion of women’s rights in the 1850s, but he remained a Unitarian minister, and became a professor at the Harvard Divinity School.
Another source for the transcendentalists’ knowledge of German philosophy was Germaine de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker) (1766–1817), whose De l’Allemagne (On Germany) was a favorite of the young Emerson. In a sweeping survey of European metaphysics and political philosophy, de Staël praises Locke’s devotion to liberty, but sees him as the originator of a sensationalist school of epistemology that leads to the skepticism of Hume. She finds an attractive contrast in the German tradition that begins with Leibniz and culminates in Kant, which asserts the power and authority of the mind.
The first thing we have to say respecting what are called new views here in New England, at the present time, is, that they are not new, but the very oldest of thoughts cast into the mould of these new times. The light is always identical in its composition, but it falls on a great variety of objects, and by so falling is first revealed to us, not in its own form, for it is formless, but in theirs; in like manner, thought only appears in the objects it classifies. What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842. As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture. These two modes of thinking are both natural, but the idealist contends that his way of thinking is in higher nature. He concedes all that the other affirms, admits the impressions of sense, admits their coherency, their use and beauty, and then asks the materialist for his grounds of assurance that things are as his senses represent them. But I, he says, affirm facts not affected by the illusions of sense, facts which are of the same nature as the faculty which reports them, and not liable to doubt; facts which in their first appearance to us assume a native superiority to material facts, degrading these into a language by which the first are to be spoken; facts which it only needs a retirement from the senses to discern. Every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist.
The idealist, in speaking of events, sees them as spirits. He does not deny the sensuous fact: by no means; but he will not see that alone. He does not deny the presence of this table, this chair, and the walls of this room, but he looks at these things as the reverse side of the tapestry, as the other end, each being a sequel or completion of a spiritual fact which nearly concerns him. This manner of looking at things, transfers every object in nature from an independent and anomalous position without there, into the consciousness. Even the materialist Condillac, perhaps the most logical expounder of materialism, was constrained to say, "Though we should soar into the heavens, though we should sink into the abyss, we never go out of ourselves; it is always our own thought that we perceive." What more could an idealist say?
The materialist, secure in the certainty of sensation, mocks at fine-spun theories, at star-gazers and dreamers, and believes that his life is solid, that he at least takes nothing for granted, but knows where he stands, and what he does. Yet how easy it is to show him, that he also is a phantom walking and working amid phantoms, and that he need only ask a question or two beyond his daily questions, to find his solid universe growing dim and impalpable before his sense. The sturdy capitalist, no matter how deep and square on blocks of Quincy granite he lays the foundations of his banking-house or Exchange, must set it, at last, not on a cube corresponding to the angles of his structure, but on a mass of unknown materials and solidity, red-hot or white-hot, perhaps at the core, which rounds off to an almost perfect sphericity, and lies floating in soft air, and goes spinning away, dragging bank and banker with it at a rate of thousands of miles the hour, he knows not whither, -- a bit of bullet, now glimmering, now darkling through a small cubic space on the edge of an unimaginable pit of emptiness. And this wild balloon, in which his whole venture is embarked, is a just symbol of his whole state and faculty. One thing, at least, he says is certain, and does not give me the headache, that figures do not lie; the multiplication table has been hitherto found unimpeachable truth; and, moreover, if I put a gold eagle in my safe, I find it again to-morrow; -- but for these thoughts, I know not whence they are. They change and pass away. But ask him why he believes that an uniform experience will continue uniform, or on what grounds he founds his faith in his figures, and he will perceive that his mental fabric is built up on just as strange and quaking foundations as his proud edifice of stone.
In the order of thought, the materialist takes his departure from the external world, and esteems a man as one product of that. The idealist takes his departure from his consciousness, and reckons the world an appearance. The materialist respects sensible masses, Society, Government, social art, and luxury, every establishment, every mass, whether majority of numbers, or extent of space, or amount of objects, every social action. The idealist has another measure, which is metaphysical, namely, the rank which things themselves take in his consciousness; not at all, the size or appearance. Mind is the only reality, of which men and all other natures are better or worse reflectors. Nature, literature, history, are only subjective phenomena. Although in his action overpowered by the laws of action, and so, warmly cooperating with men, even preferring them to himself, yet when he speaks scientifically, or after the order of thought, he is constrained to degrade persons into representatives of truths. He does not respect labor, or the products of labor, namely, property, otherwise than as a manifold symbol, illustrating with wonderful fidelity of details the laws of being; he does not respect government, except as far as it reiterates the law of his mind; nor the church; nor charities; nor arts, for themselves; but hears, as at a vast distance, what they say, as if his consciousness would speak to him through a pantomimic scene. His thought, -- that is the Universe. His experience inclines him to behold the procession of facts you call the world, as flowing perpetually outward from an invisible, unsounded centre in himself, centre alike of him and of them, and necessitating him to regard all things as having a subjective or relative existence, relative to that aforesaid Unknown Centre of him.
Word 2843
1.“Transcendentalism.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/transcendentalism. Accessed 13 Jun. 2021.
2."Transcendentalism." Definitions.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2021. Web. 13 Jun 2021. <https://www.definitions.net/definition/Transcendentalism>.
3. "What does Transcendentalism mean?" eNotes Editorial, 8 Sep. 2010, https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/what-does-mean-transcendentalism-195835. Accessed 13 June 2021.
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